Offender Rehabilitation Bill [Lords]

Chris Grayling Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Third time.

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who served in Committee and those who have spoken on Report. The Bill contained many excellent measures when it was introduced in the other place last May, but following the House’s scrutiny it returns there with important improvements.

Before I set out the detail of the Bill as it is now, and although words have already been said in the House on this, it would be appropriate to refer to the tragic loss of the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East, who played an active role in the debate on the Bill. The news we heard at Christmas time was distressing for hon. Members on both sides of the House. He will be much missed. All involved in the Bill send our best wishes to his family.

On restorative justice, the Bill gives many more victims the means to bring home the impact that crime has had on them. On drug testing, the Bill provides for testing after release for a wider range of offenders whose drug abuse contributes to their offending. For offenders who enter the justice system as juveniles but leave as adults, the Bill gives the support they need, either from an adult probation provider or a youth offending team, whichever is best suited to their needs.

I commend the excellent work in Committee of the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), who has responsibility for prisons and rehabilitation, and who has done a fine job of leading on the Bill to this stage. I pay tribute to those on the Opposition Front Bench for engaging in lively and constructive debate. We may not always agree on the detail, but this has been a constructive debate of the kind that does credit to the House. I also thank the Clerks and the Bill team in the Ministry of Justice for their advice and support.

For too long, the criminal justice system’s efforts to reduce reoffending have been hampered by a major gap in the law—the lack of any statutory supervision for offenders released from short prison sentences. As a result, the most prolific offenders have historically received the least support. The Bill will change that. It will put an end to offenders who cause havoc in our constituencies leaving prison with only £46 in their pockets and little or no support. It is not a surprise that about 60% of them go on to reoffend within a year. It is often easier for them to return to a life of crime than to sort their lives out. The Bill begins to address that huge problem.

The human cost of not providing support for that group is enormously high: 85,000 crimes every year, including hundreds of serious sexual and violent offences. The Bill will significantly reduce the terrible harm that that group of offenders currently causes to victims and communities. It will also help those people to turn their lives around.

The Bill will give 12 months of licence and supervision after release to every offender who is given a short sentence. That will give those working with them the time and professional discretion to deliver the rehabilitation necessary to provide proper mentoring support after offenders leave prison to help them turn their lives around. It will create a light-touch framework for dealing with breach of supervision that allows for sanctions in the community or a warning, as well as a return to custody. It will expand the group of offenders who can be tested for drugs after release from prison to tackle what is a major cause of reoffending, and it will make reforms to the community sentencing framework to create equivalent flexibility and discretion to what we are creating for post-release supervision and mentoring. All of those are sensible and long-overdue reforms. They will, I believe, make major inroads into the current reoffending rate of nearly 60% for short sentence offenders. They should command the unanimous support of this House.

It has been disappointing to see a long list of flawed wrecking amendments from the Opposition to our wider reforms to probation that are the polar opposite of policies that only three years ago they supported, and which they seek to undo even though they emanate from their own Offender Management Act 2007. What they have tried to undo are reforms to the supervision of offenders that will harness all sectors, bringing in the right expertise from the voluntary, community and private sectors to reinforce the work of the public sector. The reforms will bring new ideas and new approaches to rehabilitation and will deliver more for less for the taxpayer. Crucially, they will finally deliver a proper through-the-gate resettlement service for offenders leaving custody, so that support starts well before people leave prison and follows them through the gate in a seamless way. They will create a new, single national probation service dedicated to managing offenders who pose the highest risk to the public, working alongside 21 community rehabilitation companies drawing on the best of other sectors.

I am happy to say, too, that following intensive negotiations before Christmas, in principle an agreement has been reached with the trade unions on the terms and conditions for staff transferring to the new organisations. We are currently awaiting ratification by the formal probation collective negotiating machinery later this month. The unions have written to all their branches, making it clear that local trade disputes are suspended pending ratification, after which the disputes will be formally withdrawn.

The great irony of all this is that the Opposition’s approach to reducing reoffending when in government was very similar, recognising that organisations from a range of sectors have something to offer offenders. I remind the House once more of what Lord Reid said on this topic when Home Secretary:

“The Secretary of State, not the probation boards,”—

as they were then—

“will be responsible for ensuring service provision by entering into contracts with the public, private or voluntary sectors. With that burden lifted, the public sector can play to its strengths while others play to theirs.”—[Official Report, 11 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 593.]

That is precisely what these reforms do. I could not agree more with him. That is why the Offender Management Act gave wide powers to commission probation services from across all sectors, yet only a few years on it is disappointing to see that the Opposition have returned to many of their roots and want to forget that they ever passed the 2007 Act.

In spite of that, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) said on Second Reading:

“we agree with the broad objectives of the Bill.”—[Official Report, 11 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 671.]

I very much hope that this remains his position, and that right hon. and hon. Members on the Opposition Benches will join us in giving the Bill a Third Reading tonight. It is a Bill about giving rehabilitation to a group of offenders who desperately need it. It is about reducing the 85,000 crimes committed against individuals and communities across the country. It is about giving those working with offenders much greater freedom to pursue what works in stopping offenders, without all the constraints that can often exist within the public sector and without central diktat. It is about taking action for the victims of the 85,000 crimes committed by those short sentence offenders every year. Last but not least, it is a long overdue offer of rehabilitation to offenders who have been let down by the rest of society.

The Bill is designed, no more and no less, to fill a gap that is wholly unjustifiable in our criminal justice system. We cannot go on for year after year with people who are most likely to reoffend released from prison with £46 in their pocket, and with nowhere to go and no one to support and mentor them. More often than not, they simply return to the same streets and the same people, and reoffend all over again. The Opposition might not like our approach to these reforms, but in government they looked themselves at trying to do the same, and decided they could not. If they understand the importance of the step we are taking, they should at least give us credit for following a line that we believe could make the difference we have all sought for so long, and I urge the House to give the Bill its Third Reading tonight.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the six-month time scale.

No one can disagree with the objective of extending supervision and the accompanying help to all those released from prison. In this regard, I want to place on record our admiration for the massively important work that professional probation staff around the country do to rehabilitate some of the most troubled individuals while keeping the public safe. Much of the public do not realise the work of the probation service, and it is a sign of its success that the Government will leave to it the most high-risk offenders. It is welcome that offenders released from sentences of less than two years will be subject to at least 12 months of mandatory supervision in the community, but it is multi-national companies with no track record in this area that will be responsible for this, rather than the probation service, which we know can do the job very well.

It has always been an anomaly that short-sentence prisoners—the group with the highest risk of reoffending —are the ones left to their own devices when released from prison. As has been mentioned and the House knows, the previous Labour Government tried to address this with custody plus, but financial constraints prevented it from being implemented. The House also knows, from Paul Goggins’ Second Reading contribution, that by contrast the Government have no idea how much the extension of supervision to those serving 12 months or less will cost. Their impact assessment skirts around this, saying that

“the cost will be dependent on the outcome of competition”.

The Government have done nothing to update the House on this and so the plans remain uncosted.

The Justice Secretary and the Minister with responsibility for probation say that extending supervision will be paid for by privatising probation. But if that is the case, one would assume that the Justice Secretary and his officials must have figures to support it. It is hardly surprising that experts and others are suspicious about why the Government will not come clean on the numbers. The Justice Secretary has linked the cost of extended supervision to savings delivered by privatising probation, so the Bill is directly related to the wider probation privatisation plans. The two issues simply cannot be separated, which is one of the reasons new clause 1 was inserted by the other place.

The changes that flow from the Bill are untried and untested and will see supervision of serious and violent offenders fragmented. I must give credit to the Justice Secretary, whose plans have created an impressive coalition of those opposed to them: probation officers, chief executives and chairs of probation trusts, The Economist, his own officials and, most recently, the chief inspectors of both probation and of prisons, who questioned the system’s ability to cope with his plans. The chief inspector of probation warned that the plans would lead to

“an increased risk to the public.”

The Economist called the plans “half-baked.” The Ministry of Justice’s own risk register warns that there is an 80 per cent. risk of an unacceptable drop in operational performance, which when dealing with offenders can only lead to higher risks to public safety.

But still the Justice Secretary pushes ahead, with the same arrogance and dismissal of expert advice that led to the disaster that is the Work programme—a Work programme so bad that someone has more chance of still being in work after six months if they do not go on it.

[Chris Grayling]

We may be going slightly off track, Mr Speaker, but may I just point out that the Work programme is doing about twice as well as the predecessor programme that we inherited from the last Government?

[Mr Speaker]

That is totally irrelevant to the Third Reading of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Llwyd]

I hope I do not suffer a sex change, which with this moustache would be awful to see!

When we enter the legislative processes, we usually start with a lot of unanswered questions. What distinguishes the process for this Bill is that we have almost as many such questions now as we had at the very beginning. The Justice Committee took evidence very recently, and experts in the field are asking some fundamental questions about how the procedure will work and how safe it will be. I do not know; obviously, I do not profess to know all the answers.

We have had an interesting debate or two during the Bill’s passage so far. I pay particular tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright)—he is the man steering the Bill through the House—for attempting to engage constructively with the process at all times. I am sure that, on occasion, that has been as difficult for him, as it has been for Opposition Members.

Let me also associate myself, warmly and sincerely, with the tributes that have been paid to our friend and colleague Paul Goggins. He played a large part in the Bill’s progress, speaking as he did with great knowledge.

I welcome the provisions for the rehabilitation of female offenders and for the extension of restorative justice. I also welcome the parallel process—if I may call it that—of over the weekend appointing the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) to prepare a report on veterans. That is all to the good. Overall, however, I still feel uneasy, because there are a great many unanswered questions. I do not pose the following question in expectation of an answer today, but I should be pleased if the Lord Chancellor could respond to it in due course.

During our debates, including those that have taken place today, the Government have prayed in aid the Peterborough social impact bond pilot. The original published figure for crime reduction was 6%. The Under-Secretary of State said on Radio 5 Live that it was 12%. In Committee, the Justice Secretary said that it was 20%, and today, in the Chamber, the Under-Secretary of State said that it was 8%. All four figures cannot be right. It would not be a bad idea for us to be given a single figure, because that disparity underlines my unease about some of the facts and figures that have been cited. I do not think that we should be prodding around in the dark when it comes to such a potentially dangerous area of law.

[Chris Grayling]

I hope that I can help the right hon. Gentleman. Two sets of statistics have been published. The comparators are between the absolutely numerical reduction at Peterborough and the reduction among a comparable group at a prison elsewhere in the country. The 20% figure, which is the highest, refers to the number of further crimes committed by the cohort, while the lower figures show the overall reduction in the absolute rate of reoffending—the binary rate. I should be happy to write to the right hon. Gentleman and set out the figures in detail, but I can tell him now that the experience of mentoring at Peterborough has been very encouraging indeed.

[Mr Llwyd]

I thank the Justice Secretary for his response, and I am sure that he is right about mentoring. I think he will find in due course, when the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border reports to him, that it is key to any improvement in dealing with the rehabilitation of ex-service people, and I am sure that that experience will translate into other forms of rehabilitation.

I do not want to elaborate on the position that I have taken, or, indeed, on the position that anyone else has taken. We have had a good-natured tussle over the past few weeks; I only hope that some of our worst fears are misplaced, for the sake of the British people.